Britons looking for sunnier Christmas

According to travel organisation ABTA, nearly four million Britons will head overseas during the Christmas and new year period.

ABTA predicts that the busiest pre-Christmas days for travel will be tomorrow and next Thursday.

It’s estimated that around 1.5 million travellers will be jetting away from Heathrow with 700,000 flying from Gatwick, 323,000 from Manchester, 138,000 from Birmingham and 70,000 from Newcastle.

In Scotland, almost 300,000 holidaymakers are expected to depart from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen airports.

Monarch Airlines said it was flying 200,000 people abroad from tomorrow until Sunday January 9, which marks a 20 per cent increase over the 2009/10 festive period.

The airline’s most popular destinations this Christmas are Tenerife, Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca, and Malaga in southern Spain.

More than 200,000 will travel across the Channel or through the Channel Tunnel and a further 225,000 will use high-speed Eurostar trains on services between London and Paris and Brussels.